


Drunk Enough to Dance

by ossapher



Category: American Revolution RPF
Genre: Gay Trio, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-18
Updated: 2015-10-18
Packaged: 2018-04-27 00:29:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5026687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ossapher/pseuds/ossapher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Gay Trio gets in a bar fight. Contains mild violence, background Hamilton/ Laurens, and princess-carrying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drunk Enough to Dance

     By the time they realized they were not in the most Washington-friendly of taverns, Hamilton, Laurens, and Lafayette were drunk enough not to care. Lafayette, at least, was a minor celebrity and well-known to be in Washington’s inner circle, while Hamilton and Laurens had been delivering the man’s missives for months now; therefore, it would have been pointless to deny any connection. 

     In any case, it was not Tories they were surrounded by, but rather the followers and friends of Charles Lee. These men, having been deprived of any ammunition to sling at Washington’s aides by their idol’s recent disgraceful performance at the Battle of Monmouth, could not rightly seek out any confrontation, and as none of the aides planned to make any trouble, they would be fine—or at least this was Hamilton’s drunken reasoning, as he explained to Lafayette why they were perfectly safe despite the increasingly dirty looks being thrown their way. Laurens nodded sagely, which Hamilton took as a form of assent, Laurens habitually growing more silent than usual when slightly drunk. It was a rare quality, one Hamilton decidedly did not share.

     “And anyway,” Hamilton continued explaining, rather louder than might have been considered entirely polite, “they cannot impugn Washington now, not with the way he—“ 

     “—with the way he charged out onto the field and rallied the men and saved the day!” Lafayette finished rapturously.  

     “Saved the day from what, exactly?” A man stood up from one of the far tables to loom over Lafayette. 

     Ever the optimist, Lafayette did not perceive the danger. “Why, from a disastrous and disorderly retreat, of course!” he beamed.

     Laurens’ mouth grew tighter, but he said nothing. He did make eye contact with the menacing man and give a little quirk of his eyebrows, by which he meant to convey the message, _ha, yes, my friend is very drunk, please do not hold it against him._

     Unfortunately, the interpretation of eyebrow gestures is fraught with difficulty even under the most forgiving circumstances, and these were not the most forgiving circumstances. The man slammed his glass down on the table, beer leaping out and fairly soaking Hamilton. The aide blinked beer out of his eyes and wiped it off his face with his sleeves, momentarily astonished.

     “You actually believe your own tripe, don’t you!” the man cried. “If Charles Lee hadn’t had the good sense to retreat from Washington’s damn fool expedition, the van would have been slaughtered!”

     Lafayette opened his mouth, more in bewilderment than in any actual desire to retort, but Hamilton beat him to it.

     “Sir,” he said, “your beer.”

     “Well, what about it, mister Hamilton?” Several men at the table next to them turned their heads. Laurens cursed inwardly. That was it, then. They had been recognized.

     “I am wearing it, mister—mister!”

     “So?”

     Hamilton stood. Laurens, anticipating trouble, grabbed Hamilton’s sleeve and tried to pull him back down into his seat. Hamilton shook him off. “I would like an apology,” he said, enunciating every word.

     The man loomed closer, towering over Hamilton. Still, the aide did not back down, eyes narrowing and mouth forming a scowl that had cowed many a man beyond his rank. Beer, still dripping from his nose, rather shattered the effect, as did the fact that the topmost reaches of his hair barely reached the other man’s chin. 

     “You’re not getting one,” the man growled, stepping back two paces and raising his voice so that the whole tavern could hear. “I will not apologize for the heroic actions of Charles Lee, especially not to Washington’s pet whoreson creole!”

     Hamilton’s fist was on its way to the man’s face before the last word was even out; unfortunately for him, the man was not an idiot, and had moved to block it on the entirely justified suspicion that such words would be answered with violence. Hamilton’s flying arm was knocked aside, and the man quickly stepped in to close the distance between them. 

     It would have gone bad for Hamilton very quickly had Laurens not stepped smartly in front of him and taken the body-blow himself. Since he had moved practically nose-to-nose with his assailant, the man’s arm lacked space to gather momentum, and since he was a good deal taller than Hamilton, the intended painful shot to the ribcage fell against his abdominal muscles instead. He came in with a lightning left hook round the man’s upraised arm, then followed with strike after strike. He was not a particularly well-practiced boxer, but he was taller, he was less drunk than the man had guessed, and he had just heard his dearest friend grievously insulted in the way most calculated to wound. The man dodged rather than face his wrath, retreating backwards just out of reach again and again. Laurens pursued him for perhaps twenty seconds, the whole tavern silent and watching. His every sense buzzed, his mind furiously drawing up possible moves, attempting to anticipate his opponent’s: the time felt much longer to him. 

     It was not until another man tackled him from the side that he realized he had been trapped: his opponent had retreated to draw him nearer to more opponents. The second man smashed him hard into an empty table, Laurens taking the blow on the whole length of his side. An unlit lantern clattered to the ground, smashing open and spilling oil on the wooden floor. Laurens seized the hair of the man who had tackled him and slammed his face full-force into the table; if they were not going to play fair, then neither was he. 

     Another body came flying towards him. He rolled, avoiding it, and with astonishment saw that it was Lafayette. He gave his French compatriot a hurried hand up, but another man took a swing and he was forced to duck before he could say anything. This one was clearly quite drunk; Laurens seized his hand on the next pass, tugged forward until he slipped on the slick oil, and then threw him straight to the ground. 

     Another man seemed to want to try his luck with Lafayette, darting in and lunging menacingly with his fists up, but never attempting an actual blow; Laurens seized a chair and brandished it menacingly, and that seemed to be enough to scare him off. The instigator had vanished, as had many of the other patrons who had decided that Charles Lee’s honor was not worth trading blows over. The tavern was nearly empty. Hamilton. Where was Hamilton?

     There—backed into a dark corner, teeth bared, an ugly scratch from someone’s fingernail running down his cheek. Someone had ripped the ribbon out of his hair, and it fell loose around his face. He was up against two men, and fighting as though his life depended upon it. Rabbit-quick he punched up into the soft flesh under the neck of one assailant, who went down choking. But the second man kicked him straight in the stomach, slamming him back into the wall, and he folded over. The second man landed a punch hard across his jaw, and Laurens saw red. 

    He did not remember crossing the room, but he remembered blocking a kick with the chair, swinging it round—the other man seizing it—bulling forward with the chair between them until the other man tripped and fell upon his back—leaping onto him with his full weight and pinning him to the ground, knee to stomach—“Laurens, Laurens!”

     Lafayette, shaking his shoulder. “Laurens, you must help me with Hamilton. We must go.”

     Hamilton, of course. Laurens was breathing hard, every nerve singing with the rush of the fight, but he looked into the eyes of the man he had pinned. “You will let us go in peace,” he said, his voice coming out in an almost unrecognizable snarl.

     The man nodded. Laurens stood, digging in his knee a little more than was strictly necessary, and the man rolled to one side, retching.

     Hamilton was propped in the corner, chin down as though he was asleep.Laurens knelt beside him, and was relieved to see that he was conscious. 

     “Hello, Ham. How are things going?”

     “Swimmingly. As in, the room is swimming.” Hamilton leaned to one side and spat blood.

     “Did they knock out a tooth, there?”

     “Nah. Just bit myself.”

     “Do you think you can stand?”

     Hamilton closed his eyes. “Tried it. Threw up.”

     “Right. We’re leaving. I’m going to carry you.”

     “Good.”

     “You’re not hurt anywhere else, are you? How are your ribs? Can you breathe?”

     Hamilton took in a slow breath, let it out. “Fine.”

     “Right, what about your neck?”

     “I’m fine, John,” Hamilton said. “My neck is sore, probably from when I got _punched in the face_. Now pick me up, or so help me I’m walking back to camp.”

     Laurens couldn’t help but smile a little at this toothless warning as he wrapped one arm behind Hamilton’s back. “Legs forward a bit. Can you bring your knees up?”

     “Happy to,” Hamilton sniggered quietly into his ear, and Laurens flushed as he brought the other arm under Hamilton’s legs.

     “For a man who has just been knocked flat on his ass”—Laurens found a decent footing, braced, and stood with Hamilton in his arms—“you are entirely too pleased with yourself.”

     Lafayette cleared his throat with a glance at the tavern’s other occupants; though they were, to a man, engaged in the ginger and necessarily self-absorbed business of determining exactly what was broken and how badly, they still had ears.  

     “Sorry,” Laurens whispered, as Lafayette held the door and he maneuvered Hamilton through. 

     Lafayette’s expression took on an uncharacteristic sadness. For a moment, it seemed he did not know what to say, or how much to acknowledge he knew. Finally, he said, “My friends, you should never feel the need to apologize to me.” He held himself stiffly, and in their hushed conversation on the road back to the army’s encampment it came out that he had taken a hard blow to the ribs. He did not think they were broken, but inhaling too deeply caused him pain, and as such their progress was necessarily slow. Laurens, too, could not move at a brisk pace while carrying Hamilton. Though he felt like he could have carried someone much heavier without trouble, he knew from experience that this was just the aftermath of the fight making him feel stronger than he really was. Tomorrow he would be exhausted.

     The tavern was barely over a mile from camp, but it took them almost an hour to make the journey. By that time Hamilton felt ready to make another attempt at standing, and with Lafayette carefully supporting one side and Laurens the other, he managed to stagger well enough to convince the sentries that he was merely severely intoxicated. Upon reaching the narrow cot which he and Laurens shared, he fell asleep almost instantly, curled in a ball with one hand thrown over his eyes.

     “You look like you’re thinking about something,” Lafayette said, climbing into his own cot, which he was fortunate enough to have to himself.

     “Those men believed the hogwash Lee’s been spouting about Monmouth. They really believed that Washington’s plan would have got the whole van killed. We can’t allow that coward to keep undermining Washington. Just think—if he hadn’t stirred up all that resentment, we wouldn’t have fought tonight.” Laurens took out his handkerchief and absently wiped a smear of blood from the corner of Hamilton’s mouth. He sighed. “Charles Lee is going to answer for this.”


End file.
